Re: implementation of 'shell' in octave-3.6.1/share/octave/3.6.1/m/pkg/pkg.m makes package installation problems undebuggable

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Moving this to the maintainers' list, where it belongs.

On 16 May 2012 08:18, Sergei Steshenko <address@hidden> wrote:
> So, error messages appear _before_ the commands producing them, and
> this makes debugging virtually impossible. Exactly because stdout is
> captured and stderr is not, the 'shell' function implementation is
> broken by design. And AFAIK this broken implementation has been in
> Octave for years.

Ok, Sergei, you make a valid point.

Now, let me try to get something useful out of all of this.

Please. I'm begging you. Can you submit a patch and a commit message?
Or your exact proposed changes? In particular, no line numbers (they
do not help us, even if they help you), and no giant snide commentary
where it's difficult to extract your actual proposed changes.

If you don't want to generate a commit message nor a proper commit, it
really is not that difficult to at least generate a patch:

    0) Install Mercurial
    1) hg clone http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/
    2) Make the changes to the source
    3) hg commit -m "Pointless commit message" \
       -u "Sergei Steshenko <Sergei Steshenko <address@hidden>"
    4) hg export tip -o sergeis-patch.diff

Are you capable of working with others, or will you just insult us
again and not get your changes into Octave?

Please submit a change in a way that we can actually use it. Yes, I
know we're idiots, so precisely because we are such idiots, we can
only apply patches if you make it easy for us.

- Jordi G. H.